Polygon's Reviews
This new fortification system is also present in siege battles and small settlement engagements, and it's probably the biggest change to the overall Total War formula. Capturing points on the map builds up your resources, which you can then spend on fortifying defensible areas. It's a compelling tactical addition, bringing Total War closer to other real-time strategy games where it's not just about wiping out an army, but capturing points, defending them, and using resources wisely. It does, however, also take away from what Total War battles always seemed to be about: careful, tactical positioning within a semi-realistic environment.
There's a sweet spot in the middle of each run where you're powerful, but only just powerful enough to barely survive each new wave. In the final third of each run, though, things start to feel perplexingly staid.
Like Hades and Returnal, Sifu is a run-based game where each attempt is an opportunity to get further than your last. But unlike those games, its execution is needlessly complex, and it's really, really hard to tell if you're making any permanent progress.
OlliOlli World showcases that creativity in its fairly expansive multiplayer and social elements as well. Within each level, I can see leaderboard stats for other players - including a few close to my skill level, deemed my rivals. But I can also watch replays of their runs, to see how they've approached these different levels and what tricks landed them their scores. I can watch replays for the top scorers, too.
Dying Light 2’s appeal is, ultimately, more game than story.
Still, Pokémon Legends: Arceus made me care about battling, and I actually wish there were more trainer battles scattered throughout the world. But I missed some of the predictability found in the mainline series. Whenever I'd go to swap out one Pokémon for another mid-battle, I held my breath, never knowing if I'd have to take a hit from the enemy before I could attack. Hours in, I felt like the game didn't give me enough information to make some of the strategic decisions I wanted to. I love the direction in which the battles are going with Legends: Arceus, but a handful of "what the hell" moments killed some of my enthusiasm.
Prior to checking out these remasters, I hadn't touched the games since the first time I played them on PS4, and I was worried about the atrophy of my combat skills. I was initially dying more often than I thought I should have been, so I looked for adjustments. I then realized that in Performance Plus mode, I needed to use a lighter touch on the sticks to aim accurately; the controls are that much tighter on this setting. Soon, I was nailing headshots left and right. The Uncharted games are not celebrated for their gunplay, but the combat feels terrific at 120 fps - as do the spectacular set-pieces here, such as Uncharted 4's pell-mell urban chase sequence and The Lost Legacy's jaw-dropping train finale. Plus, it's exciting to see these games' stunning real-time cutscenes running at 60 fps.
Rainbow Six Extraction is all grind and no payoff
Advancing the big picture with smaller, focused, (and most importantly, repeating) goals helps keep Nobody Saves the World's progression from being too rigid or linear. Lots of RPGs and games with perk trees aspire to non-linear progression, only to have that ideal undone when players discover that advancing sequentially is still the most efficient, least-time consuming way to beat the game. Nobody Saves the World's mix-and-match system, plus the baddies' collection of wards and vulnerabilities, kept me tinkering with my builds, which is fun in and of itself. My main build exemplified and optimized my preferred playing style (it's in the Rat, actually), and then I had one or two others to deal with whatever task or dungeon was immediately at hand. On the dungeon after that, I was rummaging through my menus like a fly fisherman knowing that the perfect lure was somewhere in his tackle box.
Nothing compares to playing a game like God of War for the first time, seeing the way the water rushes out of the Lake of Nine as Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, rises from beneath the waves. But when the giant snake opened his mouth, and his voice bellowed through my headphones, I was even more awestruck by his design - his 4-year-old model and textures look excellent, even with my face just inches away from the monitor. The water dripping off of his mossy beard, the shadows in his nostrils, and his throat wavering while he speaks - it all looks better than ever. It's the same game, but with its already impressive sets and visuals turned up, creating an even more immersive experience.
Monster Hunter Rise on PC is just a different way to play a fantastic game. And while that’s great news for PC players who’ve never bought into Nintendo’s ecosystem, its graphics fail to impress, even on the most impressive of hardware.
In following these threads, Tux and Fanny transcends its original art style by introducing new games - literally found on floppy discs hidden in the world - that are essential to Tux and Fanny's lives. In these games within the game, the pixelated characters may enter a surreal 3D world, turn to claymation, or find themselves rendered in watercolor paint. Heck, there's even a home simulation video game that has me playing a looped section over and over again; the loop changes slightly each time, eventually descending into nonsense. And yet, it makes complete sense.
Perhaps the other somewhat related issue is that the game often drags things out unnecessarily, particularly in service of the main story. A number of main story quest chains in the back half of the game's plot seem as if they will never end; a constant series of either Wal-Mart runs to get soda and chips for some NPC, or worse, a string of "go here, right click to talk, 10 minutes of dialogue, repeat four times" situations that absolutely destroy the plot's momentum.
Nix Umbra understands that horror is most potent when it remains inscrutable. Like cosmic horror, it is amorphous in shape, as indistinct as a dream, and near impossible to pin down. Playing Nix Umbra, surviving a few minutes at a time and trying to piece together its many mysteries, is as close as video games come to feeling numinous. It feels as though there’s some deep, phantasmal truth lying just out of reach, perhaps at the edge of the tree line, or somewhere in the forest’s shadowy margins. One more run and surely I’ll be able to reach out and touch whatever that is?
The next time I can sucker a friend or co-worker into playing Destiny with me, the first thing I’ll tell them to buy is the Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack, and I’ll run them through the Grasp of Avarice dungeon. Not because it’ll earn them Gjallarhorn — the series’ most famous weapon — but because it’s the perfect showcase of how special Destiny can be when Bungie’s own passion shines through.
Ultimately, I just wish Chorus was pared down. The plot is full of B-movie pulp, but the game doesn’t seem interested in laughing at itself. There aren’t a lot of new ideas in the story, and the narrative isn’t delivered with grace. Will you like Chorus? That wholly depends on how much tolerance you have for everything packed around the spaceship combat.
Whether it’s kicking a samurai over a balcony railing or diving at a lady with two shotguns so I can kick her in the face, there are tons of satisfying little moments. Fighting is fun, and doing it in a tight space naturally leads to nicely cinematic moments. If you’ve been craving the small-scale, ramped-up chess feel of a title like Into the Breach, Fights in Tight Spaces is a fantastic game that packs plenty of punch.
Halo Infinite swaps out the loadouts and armor abilities of earlier games for a few new pickups, including the grappling hook, which is by far the most useful of these tools. After relying on it so much in Halo Infinite's campaign, it feels criminal to pass it by in multiplayer.
Exo One is not a mechanically deep game, nor a narratively enthralling one, but nevertheless, I see myself returning to it many times in the future. The game pulls off a fantasy I’ve heretofore only approached in my dreams: to leave all remnants of Earthliness behind and skim the surface of an alien world, the desert as smooth as polished glass.
It's fortunate, then, that this build is relatively refined. The Switch edition of Root benefits from months of feedback based on last August's Steam early access release. Many previous rough spots, such as slow combat animations and outright bugs, have been alleviated.